So, whilst scientific and medical professionals get oogie feelings about high fructose corn syrup, there is actually no proof that it is in any way worse, or, in fact, significantly different for your body than good old white sugar. So why are people getting fatter since the 1970s, when corn syrup started to become more prevalent in packaged prepared foods? Obviously it must be the presence of the corn syrup, right?

Fortunately we were able to leverage our staff of nutritionists, nutritional anthropologists and analytical chemists at Walker Nutritional Laboratories to perform our own studies. There are two significant factors at work here, damning the corn syrup:

We have become more sedentary as a culture – Since the early 70s, it seems, there has been a growing prevalence of televisions in households. Since the late 1980s, computers have appeared in nearly every home and often every room of the house. Entertainment that used to involve a game of tag or Capture the Flag is now handled by a few hours of World of Warcraft. Evening strolls around the neighborhood have been replaced by catching Lost every Tuesday.

Corn syrup is the sweetener of choice in inexpensive snack foods – Twinkies, Coke, Little Debbies – they all employ High Fructose corn syrup. Why? Because it is cheap and it lends to long shelf life. This doesn't mean that corn syrup is bad, it just means that the people eating it tend to eat more of it than they might of sucrose sweetened pastries from the local bakery. Because they eat more of them, whilst sedentarily playing World of Warcraft, they are gaining weight.

I am very sorry if I sound as though I have a chip on my shoulder about this, but corn syrup is a wholesome ingredient that does not need to be vilified in the name of the national trend towards weight gain. If you want to vilify a product, why not make it big-screen televisions? Or computers? They are much closer to the root of the cause of our national obesity than corn syrup.